Biography

Víctor M. MUÑIZ-FRATICELLI is Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law.

Prof. MUÑIZ-FRATICELLI received a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University in 1996, majoring in Government and Philosophy. In 1999 he received a Juris Doctor from the University of Puerto Rico, where he also served on law review, and later clerked at the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico for the Hon. Antonio S. NEGRÓN GARCÍA and the Hon. Federico HERNÁNDEZ DENTON. In 2008, he received a PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago for a dissertation entitled “The Structure of Pluralism”. His interests range across philosophy, politics, and law.

Recent work

Prof. MUÑIZ-FRATICELLI’s most recent work seeks to restore the importance and centrality of the concept of sovereignty (or legitimate political authority) to contemporary political theory, especially as it pertains to the ontological identity of a political society, and the relationship of such a society to various other associations and organized groups. By clarifying the idea of pluralism in meta-ethics, politics, and law, it aims to develop a defense of the autonomy of associations and of the institutions necessary for that autonomy to flourish.

It also seeks to explain how the historical and theoretical development of the concept of sovereignty may resolve important difficulties, e.g. of the way in which associations claim authority over their members, of our understanding of religious liberty, of the idea of constitutional legitimacy, and of the collective identity of a political community in an intergenerational context.

More broadly, Prof. MUÑIZ-FRATICELLI is interested in the currents of contemporary liberal theory and theory of justice—with special emphasis on the work and influence of John Rawls—and on the theory of private law and its relationship to sovereignty and constitutionalism. He continues to teach and research on matters of justice between generations.